LITTLE BIG MAN

figured out later it had been the Fourth of July.

You might have wondered what become of the two Indians who figured in my youth among the Cheyenne but seemed to have disappeared by this second residence: my enemy Younger Bear the Contrary and Little Horse, who was a heemaneh.

They had not been killed neither one, for I had asked after them and learned they was running with other bands, I expect so as to get companionship from others of their own kinds, Old Lodge Skins’s camp being too small to accommodate more than one apiece of them exotic professions. A Contrary must get mighty lonely, having to talk in reverse to all the standard people, and though a heemaneh hangs out a lot with the women, gossiping and sewing and all, he probably yearns for the company of others who understand his point of view.

I missed both of them fellows, for a like reason. I didn’t have no friends at all, other than Old Lodge Skins, and no private, personal enemies. There was plenty of surliness towards me, as I have said, and no more than I had learned to more or less walk unobtrusive past the young men of Old Lodge Skins’s band, we joined the enormous gathering around Black Kettle and the run-ins started all over again, for though the Cheyenne was officially supposed to be at peace now, they didn’t figure it to apply to white men and was still raiding the ranches and farms as long as the weather continued good, so they’d ride back in and see me and go for their weapons even in the middle of our village. It wasn’t me them young braves disliked, but the skin I wore. That’s my point about Younger Bear, who knowed me very well as personal enemies always do; and I realized, now that he wasn’t around no more, that I had taken a good deal of satisfaction from his enmity, which was particular and special, since we had growed up together.

As to Little Horse, the pressure was off him because of his way of life and he was ever pleasurable company, good for a song or dance or light conversation, not having to worry constantly about his manhood and medicine as a Cheyenne warrior always did. So far as heemanehs go, I’ll take an Indian one every time, for he knows his place in life, unlike the white variety.

Little Horse and Younger Bear: I met both of them fellows in that great camp down on the Washita River, and I’m going to tell you about it.

Late November was the time of year, the river skinned with ice and a foot of snow in the valley that would warm some in the day and then freeze into a crust at night, so if you got outside of the beaten-down floor of the campground you’d crash and crunch like a herd of buffalo and maybe cut your ankles into the bargain. Indians was still coming in from all points to this their winter quarters: war parties as well as whole villages with women, children, horse herds, and dogs. After they was settled, I’d always nose around for white faces, and having had so many unpleasant encounters with testy braves, I had got to painting myself as I done at the battle of Solomon’s Fork years ago and traded a couple of Sunshine’s dressed deerskins to a medicine man for one of them buffalo- head hats complete with horns, to hide my ginger hair. Only I didn’t use colored paint, but rather dead black made from charcoal and grease. Otherwise, my settlement clothes having worn out anyway, I wore leggings and a blue blanket. People still knew I was white, but I think thought better of me for having gone Indian as much as humanly possible.

Well sir, on this day of which I speak, a village had come in and settled on the river about a mile below us near the big horseshoe bend of the Washita, where the water was maybe eight foot deep right off the bank, which the ones who knew the place was telling the new people in case they’d want to take that cold bath the Cheyenne go in for of a morning. By God, some of them did, plunged right in while the women was setting up the lodges and swum in that chill with the fragments of ice keeping them company. That’s when I happened along and made out Younger Bear in the middle of the stream. He had a funny mode of swimming: on alternate strokes his head would rise from the water to the flanges of his nose, his eyes staying shut as the wash streamed down over them, and since he wasn’t breathing through his mouth, the effect was as though a corpse was floating up off the bottom.

While watching him, I heard myself being greeted in a voice that was too melodious for either a Cheyenne brave or a grown woman but like a young girl’s, and I turned and there was Little Horse. He wore the most beautiful dress of white antelope skin, with an eight-inch fringe, that I ever seen. The bosom was magnificently stitched with glass beads of every hue and even in that cold winter sun give the impression of how the Northern Lights might look if illuminating the Grand Canyon. And he wore a half-dozen bracelets and a string of beads so long they should have tripped him, and his earlobes was stretched like melting taffy by the weight of the great copper disks he carried there.

The manner in which he approached me, I figured he was trying to pick me up, so I says quick who I was.

And he says: “Oh yes, I know you,” and giggles, which I guess by now had become his habit, so while it got upon my nerves, I tried not show it for old times’ sake.

We held a little reunion there on the riverbank among the trampled snow, and of course he never asked me what I was doing here, for that would have been impolite between two fellows raised together, but I did have to submit to an embrace that was more sisterly than brotherly.

“You left your father’s band?” I asks after I got out of his clutches.

“That’s right,” says he, toying with his beads. “That was after Sand Creek. My father told me to. He said his medicine was bad and had brought misfortune to the rest of his family and that he didn’t want anything to happen to me because I was too pretty. Still, I would not have gone even so, were it not that Younger Bear”-he pointed towards the water-“left us after Sand Creek. He had an accident there. You know that a Contrary may not sit or lie upon a bed but sleeps always upon the bare earth. Well, the night before we were attacked, Younger Bear, without waking, in a dream, arose from the ground, arranged a robe into a bed, and lay down upon it and spent the rest of the night in that fashion. To his horror he found himself there in the morning. The softness of the buffalo robe had taken all his Contrary power from him, so when the fight came he was weak as a baby, and I had to help him run away from the soldiers up the dry bed of the stream and hide.”

“I am sorry for that,” I says, and sincerely enough, for the enmity between me and Younger Bear had always gone in only the one direction, though he sometimes annoyed me.

But Little Horse, typical of a heemaneh I suppose, passed it off fairly negligent. “Oh,” says he, “he got over it. We joined the band of Red-Winged Woodpecker, and Younger Bear sold his Thunder Bow and Contrary power to someone else, which freed him to get married.”

At that moment the subject of these remarks come in out of the Washita, shivering off the water before it could freeze on him, and since Little Horse broke off our talk to dry Younger Bear with a red blanket and help him into his clothes, I got the idea who had participated in that wedding.

So when the Bear was all dressed and looked at me, I couldn’t forbear from needling him a little, for though nobody among the Cheyenne ever condemns a heemaneh, it is O.K. to rib the fellow he lives with.

So I says: “I have just been talking to your lovely wife.”

“All right,” he says, smiling without malignance, I thought, and squeezing a quart of water out of each of his braids. “Now come and meet the other one.”

He exchanged the wet blanket for a dry one from Little Horse, swathed himself in it, and led the way among the lodges, through the crowds of dogs, and pointing to one sharp-faced animal that had a good deal of coyote in him, I expect, he told Little Horse to cook it for the guest, so the Horse popped it in the head with a club from his beaded belt and carried its limp yellow body by the hind legs along with that wet blanket, and we come to a shabby tepee and went through its entranceway.

A goodly fire was blazing in the center and over it hung the usual black pot being stirred by the usual stout woman, except her face was white beneath the dirt and her hair blonde for all the sooted grease. It was Olga.

Younger Bear turns to me and shows what I took to be an evil sneer at the time, but now I realize it was mainly pure pride, for he had no idea that his female wife and me was related other than by race alone.

“We will smoke,” he says, “and then we will eat.”

Olga looks awful as to her person, wearing a dirty buckskin dress and leggings and old moccasins gone almost to rags. The Bear might have took his regular bath irrespective of the temperature, but I believe Olga abstained according to the same schedule. I said before I seen her blonde hair, but actually it was greenish, and the tail of an uncurried horse was less tangled.